


Word Association

by sachariinne



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Doug Eiffel has ADHD, F/M, Gen, Introspection, Not Beta Read, hera isnt in this enough but like. what can u do, his adhd is mostly me projecting but like., set season 1/early season 2 but spoilers up 2. episode 39/40 i believe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:28:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27334948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sachariinne/pseuds/sachariinne
Summary: "Mission."Punishment."Spaceship."Jail.//Wolf 359 episode 11, "Am I alone now?"(doug eiffel character study bc i have feelings for him)
Relationships: Anne Eiffel & Doug Eiffel, Doug Eiffel & Hera, Doug Eiffel & Kate, Doug Eiffel & Renée Minkowski, Doug Eiffel/Kate
Comments: 9
Kudos: 27





	Word Association

**Author's Note:**

> guide for eiffel's pop culture refrences in this fic at the very end! (theres not that many but i dont want any1 2 feel out of the loop)

A thousand lifetimes ago, he had been sitting on the roof of his apartment building next to Kate, pinkies brushing together and beer bottles strewn around them. She pointed up at the sky, clouded with light pollution, thousands of traffic lights and lit-up apartment buildings drowning out all but the brightest stars. 

“'You ever wanna be an astronaut?” Her words had been slurred but the question was earnest, and he paused. Thought about _space_. Not the pathetic excuse for a night sky above him, but the kind of thing he had seen while stationed out in the middle-of-nowhere desert, thousands of red and yellow and blue stars shining persistently against an inky black void. Breathtakingly beautiful and endlessly vast. 

Thought about going there, about what it might be like to let the sky swallow him up and keep him. A single man lost amongst the stars. 

He kind of hated that, actually. It made a pretty picture, but god, he’d get so lonely without Kate to talk to (or argue with, depending). Didn’t think he’d survive a day without the burn of alcohol in his throat to get him through it either, but Kate knew that.

“Nah. I’d get bored.” And that’s not quite what he’d been thinking, but it was true enough, as even now he can’t stop drumming his fingers against his thigh, pushing his knuckles back until he hears that sharp _crack_ , over and over again. A series of pathetic attempts to let out some of that bright orange energy that curls itself into his fingertips, finds a home in the twisting muscles of his shoulder blades. It had never quite been enough, even when he was back on earth. 

“You’d forget about me.” He added, half-joking, but closing in something a little more honest. 

Kate only loved him cause he was there with her, in Texas. He knew that. Knows that if he had moved away she’d have found someone else. Someone more stable, less broken. 

He hadn’t moved away, because he was selfish and he couldn’t give her up, couldn’t just leave well enough alone. 

“I wouldn’t,” She had insisted, grinning softly, “I’d go with you.” 

Looking at Kate directly had been almost unbearable. Her dark brown eyes were bright and fervid and _intense_ . Like the sun, like tiny stars that Eiffel couldn’t stop orbiting, her smile had been a brilliant white against her tawny brown skin, lax and slightly lopsided with one drink too many. He wrapped a hand around her neck, revelling in the brush of dark curls against his skin, and kissed her softly. Thought, _I’m never going to space. I’m good right here._

Space may have been terrifying slash boring slash lonely, but Kate was warm and bright and he was so sure he loved her. 

He stands by that, actually. The thing about space, mostly, but he’s also sure he loved her. Loves her. Even if by the end they were reduced to court papers and a shaking fury behind her eyes, hidden in politely folded hands, the sharp creases of her blouse. An apology in the form of purple bruises under his eyes and folded shoulders and a guilty plea. Didn’t matter how high he waved it, though, his white flag was stained an oxidizing red, torn with a silent understanding that he could never be forgiven. Whatever his sentence, it could never be enough. 

He loved her fiercely then. Understood her in a way he never had before. 

Anyway, now he’s in space. He thinks the punishment fits the crime. 

And that’s just it isn’t it? This space station is his prison. The one he chose of his own volition, because Texas just didn’t have orange jumpsuits scratchy enough or isolation cells lonely enough or a sentence long enough for someone like him. He hates it here. That’s the point. 

It’s not all bad. 

It's mostly bad, though. It chokes him like he’s being buried alive, or drowning, an inchmeal execution. His skin burns slowly, cracking and flaking under the radiation of the star, eroded by the wolf, gnawing at him until it gets bored and swallows him whole. He knows it won’t let him go, won’t let him back home until he completes some nebulously defined mission. 

Some part of him always knew he wasn’t ever going home. 

He finds a kind of salvation in that, in every day he spends in forced sobriety, every time Minkowski snatches a pack of cigarettes from his hands, in the bright orange ache in his muscles that would usually have him pacing around his apartment at night. Now he keeps himself strapped inside his chair in the comms room, tapping and thinking and thoughtless. 

He hides the cigarettes badly on purpose. Waits for the day Minkowski snaps and takes them all, waits for the day he finally runs out. He lets Minkowski think that his biggest secrets are eight poorly-hidden packs of cigarettes, lets her think she knows him. He’s always been a surface-level kind of guy, stupid and goofy and reckless in a fun way, until he’s not. Until they see him in his goddamn _element_ , radio waves and vodka and sparking wires and dinosaur-shaped pancakes, in an orange jumpsuit with cold metal handcuffs biting insistently into the raw flesh of his wrists. Eiffel has other things hidden in that comms panel of his. 

Just one thing. Just a photo.

Minkowski hasn’t found it, because he knows she’d have questions. Not even Hera, the station's very own _Big Sister_ , knows where it is, because it’s been in the exact same spot since before day one. 

He doesn’t let himself look at it. Not even once. But god, he thinks about it constantly. About the feeling of holding Anne in his arms. Remembers her tiny fingers and round cheeks and the way her hair clumped together in thick, frizzy curls, a persistent halo around her head.

Remembers thinking _I’ve made something perfect,_ and then, _I’d better not screw this up._

Then he remembers screwing it up. The flashing light of the sirens, red and then blue and then back to red again, the sound of glass windows crashing down around him, his head hitting the steering wheel. Anne’s broken scream. 

Hera talks a lot about memory. 

Once, she tells him that if you think about something enough the neural pathways become stronger in your mind, easier to access. Makes a joke about pop culture references and his brain lighting up like a Christmas tree whenever he hears the words “Star Wars.” He thinks those memories are probably burned into his mind at this point. Scarred so deeply in his brain that he couldn’t forget them if he tried, not if Hilbert whipped out a neuralizer or Hera tried to pull an _Identity Crisis._

So, yeah, prison. 

Minkowski seems to have gotten the memo, at least. That she’s the guard and he’s her prisoner. She’s severe in all the right ways, all the blunt force of a ruler cracked over his wrist, authoritarian and unyielding, a bureaucrat with seemingly no _person_ behind her. Goddard chose well. Doesn’t mean he has to like her. 

Then the wolf flips on its axis and suddenly he’s dying (has _been_ dying), not as a prisoner but a lab rat, and he watches Minkowski struggle to make a decision, struggle to fix the problem for what he assumes is the first time in her life. 

They're allies now. Something approaching equals. He makes jokes not to piss her off, but to see the tension in her shoulders ease a little, the corners of her lips upturn in something closer to a smile. She says “I’m sorry,” and, “We’ll get through this,” like she has the power to make that decision. It’s weird. 

He understands her now. Loves her, even, in the way only two people trapped and terrified and alone together can. 

Space turns into a different kind of prison, where the guard is a red dwarf star, pulling them ever closer in its orbit, and the judge is seven light years away, smiling cheerfully to himself as he scribbles his signature on their death sentence. It’s what he signed up for, he reminds himself. Call him a coward but he's done with it, he wants to go home, wants to hide behind metal bars and a slightly softer orange jumpsuit and get piss-drunk on prison wine until he dies alone in his cell of something familiar and predictable, like alcohol poisoning or botulism. Eiffel chose this, though. He just hopes whatever money Goddard is throwing at Kate is enough, just hopes that time and distance and _this_ has been enough to earn himself a sufficient redemption arc. Knows that it can't be. 

He watches the star change from red to blue, like a warning, like a police siren, and waits for it to turn back to red, waits for the day Minkowski finds the photo hidden in the comms panel and their fragile alliance comes crashing down around him like the shattered windows of his shitty Ford Aspire. 

**Author's Note:**

> 1- Big Sister, intended 2 be a mocking refrence to 1984, as well as implying that hera isn't qualified for the job of Mother program  
> 2- Neuralizer: a memory wipe device from the series Men In Black  
> 3- Identity Crisis: a comic series. the relevant part of the plot being that a group of heroes wipe the memory of a villan, turning him into an "ineffectual buffon" which i could not have described better myself. cough pryce finale cough foreshadowing cough
> 
> find me on tumbrl @gaymergf or on my art blog @sachariinne


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